Heart of a Wife: The Diary of a Southern Jewish WomanIn 1995, NPR editor and producer Marcus D. Rosenbaum met his grandmother-fifty years after her death. Rosenbaum and his family were attending to the bittersweet business of cleaning out the family home after his father died when, in an old closet, in a ziplock bag, his niece discovered a gateway to the early part of the century and into the life of Helen Jacobus Apte, a Southern Jewish woman living in post-Victorian era Florida and Georgia. The covers of his grandmother's diary were cracked and the pages were beginning to yellow, but there it was: almost forty years of passion, doubt, love, and life, penned in unflinching candor. Heart of a Wife: The Diary of a Southern Jewish Woman is the collection of Helen Apte's own diary and essays by her grandson, Marcus D. Rosenbaum, who edited the volume. This book reflects Apte's unorthodox, complex, and independent spirit during a very conservative time. Her shockingly frank opinions are offered on sex, marriage, children, religion, and her native South. Crafted in the heartwarming yet heart-wrenching style of Angela's Ashes and A Midwife's Tale, Heart of a Wife allows the reader a unique glimpse at significant events that gripped the world during the first half of the twentieth century: the Great Depression, the World Wars, and the sinking of the Titanic are but a few. |
From inside the book
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... feel . My nerves always feel quiet and soothed when I get back to my room ! — And so I find it well to come For deeper rest to this still room , For here the habit of the soul Feels less the outer world's control ; And from the silence ...
... feel she is admired and desired by another man not her husband . It thrilled me , it rejuvenated me , it made me joyful , but it did another thing to me - it brought me up with a jerk with the realization that my youth is passing , is ...
... feel all the " Pollyanna " things I used to feel . " Life is real , life is earnest " and " I know I cannot drift beyond His loving care . " Those are the sentences my mind used to say , but when I try to say them now , the little imp ...
Contents
Hard Times among the flat Dwellers 19111913 | 43 |
At Home at War the Roaring Twentiesand Alice | 73 |
Photographs | 103 |
Copyright | |
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